Party corruption and the race card.

Party corruption and the race card.

The focus today is two articles on political parties. The first one focuses on how parties actually corrupt government because they put the party before the country. Bruce Walker says that happens in both parties, but that it is more dominant on the left because conservatives want limited government and to be left alone by government, and that affects the Republican Party. For sheer power’s sake, the Democratic Party will stoop to really low places.

The second article is related in that one of the lowest places the Democratic Party stoops is accusing their opponents of every disgusting thing in the book, but the most disgusting and untrue and most powerful tool of derision is calling their opponents “racists.” Jeffrey Lord shows how that’s happening again in the illegal immigration debate (and really disgustingly by our president!) But, it’s no longer working. Hooray.

Parties corrupt government.

Bruce Walker of the American Thinker website has an interesting take on how the party system in America can and often does corrupt government, just as parties in Germany and the USSR did. He says that it isn’t just statism that corrupts parties, but the other way around. Those parties driven by “interest groups” are truly the exact opposite of what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To quote Mr. Walker, “Interest-group parties are poison to ordered liberty.” Now ponder that for a minute. Truer words were never written.

(Conservatives) want limited government…because more government means less liberty. But even the most manifest modern versions of vile malice, like Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s empire, were not so much sins of “statism” as sins of “partyism.” Nazis and Bolsheviks saw government as a hand puppet of the Party…The very term “Nazi” refers to a party, not a government.

Those familiar with the grim saga of Soviet power know that the Communist Party, a completely voluntary organization, wielded real power. Stalin, virtual dictator of the Soviet Union, did not even have a government job until May 1941, when he became premier. By that time, Stalin had managed to murder millions, purge many thousands, and terrorize everyone in the Soviet Union — how? He was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Party, Nazi or Communist, ran the state, and not the other way around.

…(The founders) constructed in our system of government safeguards for little states against big states, separation of legislation and execution of laws, sovereign states to limit the federal government, and so on. Without party trumping government, “checks and balances,” “separation of powers,” and “federalism” are self-correcting mechanisms. The toxin the founders dreaded was “factions.”

Mr. Walker uses the recent Obamacare abomination as an example of parties as factions.

… Six of twenty-six Democrat governors, all from conservative states, voiced concerns about ObamaCare. Nearly all Republican governors — Arnold being an exception — opposed ObamaCare. Democrat state attorneys general were much more reluctant to file lawsuits against ObamaCare than their Republican counterparts. It is party driving the state, and not the other way around.

… Not all parties are the same. Some are based upon philosophies of governance; others are based upon “interest group” advocacy. Those of us called “conservatives” simply want an impartial government. .”…The Republican Party supported equality for blacks when that principled stand cost them one-third of the nation and huge numbers of white votes outside the South.

The left, by contrast, is an interest group movement, just like the Nazis and just like the Bolsheviks. It embraces Nazi themes like “social justice” — consigning whites, males, Christians, the affluent, patriots, and others into a leftist-patrolled ghetto. The KKK also supported “social justice” — so did Father Coughlin, Juan Perón, Fidel Castro, and all those sibling interest-group parties or movements. The state can be used by these odious types, but it is the social justice thugs, not the state per se, which are the problem.In the current immigration firefight, what do conservatives want? More government! We want the federal government to rigorously enforce the law. The left wants the state to vanish and our borders to become meaningless.

This sort of bigotry against certain citizens in favor of others is so common now that we forget that the prostitution of government to the needs of only some Americans is the opposite of what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin wished to leave us. Whatever structure of government is bequeathed to a people, political parties which champion particular interests will, inevitably, destroy the worth of that structure. Interest-group parties are poison to ordered liberty.

…That is why the Tea Party resonates so well. Far from championing any particular factions of America like Obama, who plans to reinvigorate his party by enthusing the young, African-Americans, Latinos, and women, the Tea Party champions simply ordered liberty.

…When government acts, it should be only in the general welfare, and those words of Article I are in direct conflict with the toxin of “our group’s interest.”…

…when the KKK lynches a black, more government is required, and when Storm Troopers terrorized German streets or Mafia internecine wars decimate Sicily, more government is required. Factions are the infection, and when these infect government, we are lost. The abuse of government for special interests, not just government itself, is the mortal blow to liberty.

This seems especially pertinent in the case of Arizona, where the federal government abdicates its responsibility to secure our borders while vilifying the state for stepping in where the feds stepped out. Selective enforcement of our laws leaves Americans wondering what law is these days other than something to beat us over the head with rather than something to secure our rights and our liberty. John Adams was right: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Read it all here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/more_than_just_government.html

Shattered “racist” template.

Jeffrey Lord over at The American Spectator has a very revealing piece about how the Democrats are really the party of race and how now that we have a vibrant conservative media, that “racist” template is no longer working so well.

A liberal template is being shattered in Arizona. The template of race.

It’s an important liberal template too. Central to the success of one of the biggest of liberal myths. The myth? That the electoral successes of the Left throughout American history have had nothing to do with race, much less racism…

He also says that myth is closely related to the myth that liberals are the all-caring, out for the little guy people.

The truth, however — and that truth is reappearing vividly once again in Arizona — is that the American Left could not have made it to the 21st century without tying itself tightly to abject racism. It has secured political success in the past by playing every possible race card from supporting, in order, slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan and racial quotas, while fiercely opposing the legal immigration of Asians…Now, in the piece de resistance, the Left is using the race card with illegal immigration. And it is no accident that what began with racial appeals to whites (in opposing rights for blacks and legal immigration for Asians) moved on to racial appeals to blacks and now to brown-skinned Americans. The more the race changes, the more the approach stays the same.

The liberal media, but of course, is complicit. And, it is most import to understand, ithas always been so. If liberals were the (literal) slave masters and segregationist bullies of America’s past (and they were), the left-leaning press was the plantation PR agent…the American Left has danced, tangoed, waltzed, and fox- trotted when not sleeping with every incarnation of racism in America from the beginning to this moment. Somehow, this just never made it into the news of the day as reported by all those Lefty journos…

He goes on to point out how the liberal media never wrote about the racist that was their first “progressive” leader, Woodrow Wilson, in the three-page long article about him in the New York Times after his death in 1924. He also showed how progressives in the media worked alongside progressives in government to use both sides of the racism coin to sell big government first to whites and then to blacks.

There was not a single, solitary word that Wilson was not only a thorough-going racist, had avidly courted like-minded segregationists to get elected (carrying the 13 states of the “Solid South”) but had used his presidential power to both segregate the federal government and appoint rabid progressive-racists to powerful posts, such as Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Daniels, on cue, promptly segregated the US Navy. Snip –

…The Times was relentless in reporting blacks as perpetrators of all manner of bad deeds — because this supported the need for progressive-racists to appeal successfully for white votes. It worked. And when Woodrow Wilson died, the historical record of what he had actually done — the true nature of the relationship between the left and racism during the Wilson presidency — vanished…Snip –

Progressives presented big government to blacks in precisely the same way they presented it to white Southerners: tied tightly together to the idea of racial identity. Thus emerged a whole generation of progressive black politicians who were the mirror image of their white supremacist counterparts: each exploiting the combustible mix of racism and big government. Snip –

The newest crop of those pushing the old progressive-race theme — this time with Latinos — include the well-schooled members of the Congressional Black Caucus. This being the group that proudly excludes non-blacks — that would be Latinos as well as whites — per Congressman Clay. So a group of Democrats that deliberately discriminates against Latinos and whites in the fine style of their party’s tradition is out there using the r-word with all the skill of George Wallace if not the subtlety of Woodrow Wilson or the New York Times.

The “racist” label is quickly affixed to any and all who believe in a color-blind America, just as the “n-word” once was employed in the quest for progressive electoral victories based on appeals to white supremacy. This in turn fills American leftist politics with those who use only a marginally updated version of that George Wallace quote to succeed, simply substituting the “r word” for the “n word.” As in:

“You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about racists, and they stomped the floor.”

“It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos, and women, who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.”

And right there, the liberal template on race — in use for the better part of two centuries — has now begun to shatter.

Why?

The conservative media exists — and from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Times to the New York Post to Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio — the entire progressive-race axis is not only being exposed it is being mocked. Snip –

The problem for progressives is that in today’s world millions of Americans of all colors — those who really do believe in a color-blind society and live it everyday with family, friends, neighbors, employers, employees, colleagues and so on — simply refuse to be played. A Rasmussen poll shows that 70% of Arizonans — not just white Arizonans but all Arizonans be they white, black, brown, red or yellow — want their border secured. Like people everywhere else in America they have locks on their door for a reason, and cannot fathom the idea that if their house were suddenly invaded by hundreds of uninvited and increasingly violent people of any race they would be deemed “racists” for calling the police.

It’s rather sad that an entire political party can’t let go of the racist meme. An entire American political party seeks only to divide (but says it wants to bring us together). If that hypocrisy cannot be seen by those who follow this party, then they are truly the racists, aren’t they? There’s much more at the link with interesting takes from Peggy Noonan, Mark Steyn and a few others. Folks are catching on and are no longer going to be cowed by the “r” word any longer. Read it all: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/05/04/the-shattered-template-in-ariz